Xblog

The older news story is the Tamarin project, which is finally going to bring JIT technology to the world of Javascript in a big way (technically Tamarin was already in Acrobat’s Javascript engine, but let’s face it, most Javascript isn’t written for that platform). Word to the ignorant: up until now, Javascript has been painfully slow. Back when I was in the lab someone wrote a spring physics based graph-layout engine in Javascript. They were having problems with the algorithm, and being kind of weak in Javascript, I rewrote the thing in Java. After we got all the kinks out of both versions, the Java version appeared to be an easy 100x faster (possibly 1000x). Seriously.

Since then, I’ve looked a lot more closely at Javascript and discovered it’s not nearly as bad as I’d perceived it to be. It’s kind of a LISP-y language, with some handy little scriptisms in it, and SpiderMonkey makes it fairly easy to embed in C programs (someone needs to make a C++ interface that is like Boost’s Python library so I can say the same thing about C++).

The other big news is that today, Java is getting GPL’d. Specifically the HotSpot VM is being GPL’d along with Javac, with the standard libraries to follow (the VM is far more interesting as Java’s standard libraries tend to be only marginally better than what GNU Classpath has to offer). It will be interesting to see what comes of this, but the optimist in me hopes this will finally make Java more acceptable to the broader open source community and will lead to Java working better on more platforms. Myself, I want to see just how quickly I can hack a more async I/O style interface for Java’s IO libraries (yes, one could do this with JNI before, but you can do more interesting things with access to the full runtime). It’d also be fun to try to hack in an execution model that allows processes to share more of the Java VM’s resources, although that will undoubtedly take more time. I suspect more than a few people will be looking at ways add support for explicit disabling of bounds checking. The really most awesome hack to the Java VM has to be adding support for efficient unsigned arithmetic. That requires new byte codes, but man would it be wonderful.

The irony with both of these milestones is that in some ways they are both non-news events… except for how long it has taken for them to come around. Given Javascript’s popularity, you had to think that sooner or later JIT’s or some equivalent would become the norm. Instead, Javascript’s lackadaisical performance has helped relegate the language to “least common denominator status”, although AJAX allows you to offload work on to the only resource likely to be slower than your local Javascript engine: the web server. ;-)

As for Java becoming open sourced… Sun has been playing hot-and-cold on this one seemingly almost since the language was invented (a prize for whoever finds the oldest comment from a Sun executive which suggests that Java might in any way become open sourced). Based on what’s been in the press, this would have been a non-news event five or six years ago.

I have to say, I worked at Sun back when it was still getting sales by being the “dot in .com”, and one of the primary reasons I left the company was that it was clear to me that internally they just didn’t grok what was happening with open source and why what they absolutely needed to address this on the Solaris side of things in some fashion (either by the OpenSolaris route they chose or by porting Solaris tech to the Linux kernel and abandoning Solaris altogether) and simply make Java open source ASAP (while I thought what they did with openoffice was great news for the open source world, it didn’t strike me as indicative of a larger understanding). Gosling’s history with the free software movement didn’t exactly give one confidence that this was going to change either.

It’s good to see them coming around on this. I’m increasingly running out of reasons not to have a Solaris box at home. I’m about ready to look at the OpenSolaris hardware compatibility list and see just how cheap a box I can put together (I just don’t have enough RAM on my desktop to do Solaris justice with VMware).